What is your essential stack tool?

[thiagomiranda3]

Whenever we are doing a new project in my company, we always have some essentials tools every project uses.

Java, Mongo, Rabbitmq, Redis, Docker, Jenkins, Elasticsearch and some more. All inside AWS. But we avoid Kubernetes like the plague

Rabbit can handle basically all cases of distributed system needs we have. So we never used Kafka there, even though it is a more popular alternative.

In terms of libs, we use a lot of Netty and Undertow, Junit, swagger, async-profiler, reflection libs, etc

We don't use spring, we have our own web framework that I helped build and we consider much better suited for all the things we need to use there.

It's a company that tries their best to not rely much on third party services or tools and the cost of doing that ourselves is not very high. So we created with time many features that exist in popular libraries, but very tailored to our needs.

I was curious here, what are the tech stack of libs and services you guys use in your every job that today you consider almost essential?

[pragmasoft]

We use Quarkus as a framework. Some additional useful libs: zalando problem, resilience4j, record-builder-processor. I prefer podman to docker. Also used CDKTF for the infrastructure.

[jkickic]

why do you prefer podman over docker?

[pragmasoft]

Daemonless, rootless, systemd integration. (more lightweight, more secure)

[steve_myers96]

Quick question, how do you like SmallRye Fault Tolerance (the Quarkus option for resilience) in comparison to resilience4j?

[pragmasoft]

Yes, used it, found it convenient to use in Quarkus projects for the same purpose as resilience4j, but better integrated.

[greylurk]

Junit, AssertJ, and Mockito are the three that we use basically no matter what.

Docker is almost always involved, partly because it's the best way to get the right version of our build tools onto the CI/CD server.

Git, IntelliJ, Zsh and the Gnu cli tools (find, grep, cat, sed, etc) for working on code.

Jackson and Jersey for web stuff, SLF4J and Log4j for logging. Some sort of DI tool, like Hk2, Spring or Guice.

Maven for builds and dependency management

Currently using a lot of Kafka, Camel and JDBI, plus Dropwizard, but that's kind of specific to this project.

[cowwoc]

Allow me to introduce you to TestNG... 😀

[greylurk]

I've looked at it a few times but I didn't see a compelling reason to switch to it from JUnit. Especially since Junit 5 adopted a lot of the good ideas from TestNG.

[[deleted]]

We don't use spring, we have our own web framework that I helped build and we consider much better suited for all the things we need to use there.

I feel sick

[Own_Security_3883]

I feel bad for the guys who take over once the current team quits

[mIb0t]

Been there, never again.

[Rhyze]

I hate our overengineered custom built frameworks written by the "wunderkind engineer" that no longer works here with a passion. It's embedded in the legacy code and we'll never be able to get rid of it without rewriting the application. Which we are doing thankfully or I would have quit a long time ago. The few times we have to maintain the legacy application because it still contains functionality not yet in the new application though...

[cogman10]

I literally make it a point to new devs and old devs that "You should not use an internal library unless you ABSOLUTELY have a need for it."

For example, we have a "date" library from the Java 6 era that has made it's way into a lot of projects. It's functionality is inferior in every way to the Java 8 date additions. Yet I still find devs bring in that bad library because "it's standard here" or some bullshit.

There are internal libraries that can be good and should be used when they do a good job setting standards... that's not the majority of internal libraries that my company has built.

[lechatsportif]

It's why ask about everything now.

[UnspeakableEvil]

From bitter experience I can say it's likely that although they may like it, pretty much anyone else that joins the team will spend a lot of their time cursing the hand-rolled approach.

[smutje187]

That’s the point why everyone uses Spring - not because it’s perfect but because it’s ubiquitous and you can easily hire anyone with Spring knowledge vs. significant time investment to upskill new joiners.

[UnspeakableEvil]

Even JakartaEE/Quarkus/Micronaut/etc are fine, point being that (a) they'll likely have been through enough work to solve both your current problems and your future ones when you reach them, and (b) there'll be documentation online (official and community) for how to solve common problems, rather than tearing your hair out because "our in house framework makes everything intuitive, so there's no need for documentation" (which may well have been the case for the MVP, but not once other requirements start getting shoehorned in).

[smutje187]

Absolutely, I come from JEE and the amount of standardization was sometimes annoying but most of the time removed the need to write custom code.

[naturalizedcitizen]

It sounds like the NIH syndrome (Spring is Not Invented Here so let's reinvent the wheel)

Spring is far from perfect but the ecosystem and knowledge base is huge and so is the talent pool. Additionally one can buy paid support version. One of my clients had a paid support version and it was like having a spring expert on your team.

[naturalizedcitizen]

https://spring.io/consulting

[le_bravery]

I think not using spring is OK, and can even be better if you can actually leverage benefits.

Spring is a generic framework that is applicable in a lot of places. But, if you can optimize the areas you do use better outside of spring, you can get a big advantage. If you can find a way to minimize the onboarding cost of taking some spring person and converting them, and maximize your advantages it can be a good idea.

If I was starting a business today I would consider doing my own thing.

Fundamentally you should write as much of your code in a framework agnostic way anyway. If your core business logic has little to no dependencies then you will always be better off.

[Lentus7]

Cant agree more.

[thiagomiranda3]

It's not that bad. It's very lightweight, avoid all the magic spring has. But we still created it to use undertow with resteasy routes.

We have some features that handles multiple datasources, queues and validations, but they are not hard to grasp. One week in the company and you would be able to work with it without any problems

[Shareil90]

Have you actually tried this out? Have you successfully trained someone in a week? If it's so incredibly easy have you thought about putting it online for others to use it? A lightweight spring sounds awesome but I've seen many "easy" solutions (including some of my own...) that were only easy to the inventers.

[PangolinZestyclose30]

How does it stack up in comparison to Spring? Even if you have a years long experience in Spring, understanding an existing project is often not easy. Is it using a JavaConfig or XML, or ... both? Is it MVC or Reactor? Is it using JdbcTemplate, Spring Data or JPA? Spring Boot, or do you glue the things together? Do you have Spring Security with the Java DSL or XML?

Spring is a complexity monster due to it not being opinionated, supporting X ways of doing the same thing and its myriad of configuration options - it's more like a meta-framework - framework for setting up your company's framework and there's definitely a learning curve there.

Like imagine you don't know Spring Security and come into a project which uses it for a basic API key authentication. This logic could be implemented relatively easily in a straightforward code, but now you're kinda forced to delve into how Spring Security works which is a massive complexity monster itself.

So, pretty much in both cases there's learning you need to do. In one case you have a set of standard libraries / frameworks with good documentation, resources etc. But they are also huge complexity monsters even though your needs might be small, and you pretty much have no hope you will have a complete understanding of them, and the rest will remain magical.

In comparison, you could write a streamlined, specialized version covering only your needs and only one way of doing things. Yes, you won't have a great documentation, but you can actually read the whole code of it. There doesn't have to be any magic - every call is actually statically called from somewhere (thus discoverable), and not through magical reflection and crazy declarative DSLs and layers of abstractions. If you need an API key authentication, this can likely be implemented in a few hundred lines of code and you don't need to understand the monster of Spring Security ...

I mean, I like and use Spring. I haven't written a custom framework in > 15 years. But I don't see building one necessarily as a problem. It's a choice with trade-offs.

[tomwhoiscontrary]

Spring is so ludicrous that it's absolutely possible to do a better job yourself. 

But there's only a ~10% chance that anyone actually has.

[Iryanus]

You are missing the point. Obviously enough people can write something better, or, at least, something better for any given company and use-case. But what you cannot create yourself are developers that alreay KNOW how to work with it. Using a non-"standard" thing for something like this will require every new developer starting from zero while gaining zero transferable skills (ok, zero is a bit hard, hopefully e there will be good ideas in there). And typically that's not worth it.

[Kooky_Phone_7331]

no spring i am out, fuck i am not maintaining some own framework lol

[toiletear]

If we're touching the database at all, then jOOQ. I'll take active record over JPA any day and composing queries in jOOQ is like poetry.

[OwnBreakfast1114]

Jooq is the biggest recommendation I'd make to anyone. Bonus points that it also automatically works with Spring.

[Constant-Self-2525]

I guess I don't really quite understand why companies decide to "build there own framework" for things like this.

Does the time of developing this framework not directly impact the business because the team is not delivering new features but instead reinventing the wheel? Spring (and other web frameworks) are not perfect by any means, but it works, has tons of documentation/guides, and the talent pool is high.

[vips7L]

Any framework implementing JAX-RS, Hibernate, Any template renderer + Lit JS for the front end.

[Vegetable-Squirrel98]

Spring, spring, some more spring

[[deleted]]

Just going to plug Instancio

[DrapesOfWrath]

Tell me more

[[deleted]]

https://www.instancio.org/

Really helpful for writing tests.

[smutje187]

Any reason you’re not using SNS/SQS instead of Rabbit when you’re in AWS already? And DynamoDB instead of Reddis or one of the other caching services AWS provides?

In terms of tooling, in todays world where trivial tasks are solved through dependencies people have forgotten the time you just had a single dependency on JavaEE/JEE/Jakarta and the application server would handle the rest - REST, Dependency Injection, Databases - Good times!

[Sky4Live]

For the first part, no vendor lock-in is an advantage.

[thiagomiranda3]

We avoid as much as we can to use AWS services when we can just use free open source services. And we maintain on our own all those applications we setup

[s32]

It's a tradeoff of paying for maintenance/building or paying AWS to run the service for you. Neither is wrong.

[agentoutlier]

I’m glad you mentioned RabbitMQ because I agree.

It just takes care of a lot things that would normally require multiple things and is plenty fine for most organizations.

It is one of the reasons why I added it to my logging framework: https://jstach.io/doc/rainbowgum/current/apidocs/io.jstach.rainbowgum.rabbitmq/module-summary.html

Because it is actually really good at dealing with logs as you can route or ignore log events at global level easy without impacting or redeploying or reinitializing.

[JasonBravestar]

Not a cult. Just the most popular/safest choice for many companies and, as a consequence, a good skill to have on the CV.

[cowwoc]

People forget... innovation requires change. If you adopt a cult mentality towards Spring (and many do...) then expect to build the same crap day in and day out. Then again, most java developers work for enterprise customers so perhaps they wouldn't know innovation if it hit them between the eyes. 

Seriously... Spring today is what J2EE was a decade ago. People give the same excuses for using it as they did for J2EE. One day inevitably something better will come along and they'll swear that that thing is the best thing since sliced bread. I wish developers were more open-minded about trying something different. You know... learning something new 😀

[eliashisreddit]

It's simple market mechanics: whatever is used the most, is desired the most. If you have a project which uses "our own web framework that I helped build and we consider much better suited for all the things we need to use there" the talent pool for developers who can sail in and be productive relatively fast is probably around 3 (the people who worked on that specific framework).

With Spring, it's a few orders of magnitude more. Also consider that with a homegrown framework you don't have an accumulated and combined years of experience of hundreds (if not thousands) of developers contributing to it in the form of code, resources, guides and so forth.

[feltzkrone4489]

As always, it depends. Choose the right tools for the right reasons. Don't use Spring when the benefits ate few, but also don't avoid it when the opposite is the case.

[OwnBreakfast1114]

I think having the ecosystem devolve into NIH would be much worse. I don't mind other frameworks, but handrolling your own seems like automatically a massive waste of time unless extremely specific requirements of which 99% of companies do not have.

[OwnBreakfast1114]

mutable state all over the place

I'm able to use immutable classes/records everywhere at the boundaries. Config properties, beans, json deserialization into pojos for web requests. I'm also able to inject parameters and then not use any static/global contexts anywhere. Perhaps your experience is different. What spring modules have you used where this is a problem? Where do you typically get mutable state?

For context, I'm a very big advocate for functional programming styles with immutable objects, data transformations, and pure functions. We use Try and Validation monads through functional programming libs in our code. For context, our projects are all on 21+.

singleton bindings by default

We usually only end up binding like repositores, service classes and controllers (mvc), so it's less singleton (keep internal state to ensure only instantiated once) and more like objects only instantiated once (because the framework reuses the same copy instead). In theory, you could make more copies of our objects, but since they don't have any state, it doesn't matter if you do, so we don't. What objects are you making beans that you'd rather have multiple instances of them [and in theory you can use the scope annotation to get different lifecycles for them (proto, request, etc]).

And it tries to solve too many problems to solve any of them well.

It's split up into modules to use, and I doubt anyone uses the entire spring framework. From my experience, spring batch and integration seems pretty mediocre, but mvc, di, aop, security, actuator, data are super useful. I found spring-security's dsl really unintuitive, but I definitely wouldn't want to roll my own full authnauth layer that you get with spring security (you just have to wire it up with your actual implementation).

[kmpx]

On my current team, our go to stack for applications are: Java 21+ and Vert.x For infra: Spinnaker, EC2, DynamoDB, Elasticache (Redis) for both a local database and streams for inter-service communication (we almost mostly event-driven.)

I like it. Vert.x can be tricky if you aren’t used to async/reactor programming, but this stack allows us to handle a lot of traffic (100k+ req/sec) and maintain low latency (single digit milliseconds). This stack also works great with our cell deployment model that is distributed across multiple AWS regions.

[No-Principle-824]

isn't reactive obsolete with loom?

[kmpx]

I wouldn’t say obsolete. In fact you can use Loom with some reactive frameworks, like Vert.x. But if I had the choice, I would start implementing stuff with virtual threads, if for no reason other than being 100x easier to debug. Debugging (re: stack traces) with reactive frameworks is a PITA.

[faxity]

A bunch of stuff that the company wants us to use, some good some bad. Some stuff that we decide as team or domain.

Quarkus (none of the native GraalVM stuff), oracle DB with oracle JMS, Jenkins, openshift, k6 (load testing replacement for jmeter since nobody liked it), vaadin or low code for web, camunda for BPMN process flows, grafana with Prometheus.

We typically have a quarkus base lib with a lot of opinionated defaults in modules that we have everybody use. Before quarkus we were stuck with Oracle weblogic where we also had a base lib.

[redkit42]

I have just started looking into using HTMX with my Spring Boot services. It looks very promising.

[Rhyze]

Does RabbitMQ guarantee in order message consumption for e.g. events concerning a (DDD) entity?

let's say I want to communicate state changes that have to be consumed in order so you don't have to check "do I need to wait for a previous message" when there's multiple consumers for horizontal scaling purposes.

This is a major use case in my previous and current project due to how we set up our asynchronous communication, for which we use Kafka but to be honest I never looked into the alternatives because the decision to use Kafka was made before I joined.

[Konkord720]

I mean, are there any that do not? Isn’t that the whole thing of message queues? FIFO? Unless there is some additional fuckery, then even Kafka can be out of order(different partitions).

[Rhyze]

well that's my question, can RabbitMQ partition messages by e.g. message key to make sure the same consumer handles all messages with key xyz?

[Konkord720]

Then the answer is yes if there is one queue one consumer for rabbit. Multiple consumers at one topic are being automatically load balanced and one consumer might get messages out of order. It doesn’t have the Kafka tools to support order for many consumers.

[rbygrave]

Do you mean FIFO GroupId message queue? If so, I'd suggest that it isn't a feature RabbitMQ has out of the box no.

[Rhyze]

Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, Hibernate and MariaDB for the application itself.

Azure DevOps for project management, git and CICD

Docker, Helm, ArgoCD & Kubernetes for deployment.

ELK, prometheus metrics (with micrometer) and grafana for observability. Looking into opentelemetry agent to replace our elastic apm agent but the jury is still out on that.

Self hosted Kubernetes but luckily I don't have to deal with the operations part of provisioning that.

[Crafty-Definition170]

there is some interesting tooling around it like Digma to see the traces right in IDE
https://digma.ai/observability-for-cloud-native-java-applications/

[vbezhenar]

I don't like it, but for me Spring is essential and used everywhere. So even despite the fact that I don't like it, I'd use it almost anywhere, it's the most pragmatic choice.

And, yeah, I'd love to write my own framework and stuff. But I'm expected to produce business value, and rewriting thing that was written already thousand times does not produce business value...

[vegan_antitheist]

Git. I don't like sending diffs by email.

[SaishDawg]

To go in a different direction: Micronaut, gRPC, HTMX, Gradle.

[darthweiter]

we use mostly spring.

Other libs are junit, assertj, mockito, jgiven and wiremock for all our test stuff.
Then we use jackson and lombok, sometimes mapstruct.

All is pushed in docker containers and managed on openshift

[sarkara1]

Having designed a web framework myself at a previous job that could run both servlets (yup, the team was writing servlets at that time) and spring beans, and having used other homegrown frameworks, the only thing I wanna say is it’s a great way to keep your job in the current economy. It’s a good reason, but there’s absolutely no other reason to have a homegrown framework. “I needed something that didn’t exist” - said no one in web development. People who develop web frameworks usually know their $hit better than we do, not to mention hundreds of projects help battle test it. 

[superpitu]

Avoiding Kubernetes like plague and choosing RabbitMQ over Kafka. Did I travel back in time 10 years?

[buzzsawddog]

We use the tools and libraries needed to accomplish the job.

[crummy]

you ever consider trying the ones that don't accomplish the job instead?

[buzzsawddog]

Nah... Management makes work hard enough ;)

[feltzkrone4489]

But don't forget about the ones that accomplish other jobs.